Much Mediterranean migrant literature captures the Mediterranean’s fossilized binaries, North and South. But, The Two-Edged Sea also reveals that one inheres within the other. While the book explores two Mediterraneans, with asymmetrical power relations that reflect the sea’s northern and southern shores, it also delves into how they have been in dialogue with each other, effectively deconstructing the binary. Charting undocumented journeys from the Mediterranean’s southern shores, the book contributes both to discourse on migration literature and the current resurgence of the study of seas, while advancing the idea of the Mediterranean as both a dividing border and unifying contact zone.

This study into both reformism and mysticism demonstrates both that mystical rhetoric appeared regularly in supposedly anti-mystical modernist writing and that nineteenth- and twentieth-century Sufis actually addressed questions of intellectual and political reform in their writing, despite the common assertion that they were irrationally traditional and politically quietist.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a great increase in the use of the printed word and the press by non-European actors to express and disseminate ideas and to participate in the intellectual life of both their home societies and a wider international context. This book examines the French-language writings of Ottoman and Algerian writers between 1890 and 1914.